Scientists May Have Got Evidence of Aliens Trying to Contact Us

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Two
astronomers think they have plucked signals from 234 extraterrestrial civilizations. In 2012, Ermanno Borra of Laval University in Quebec, suggested
that lasers might be the method by which we receive first contact from
extraterrestrial intelligence.

He
hypothesised that we would see periodic bursts of light hidden in the spectrum
of the host star of the civilisations, faint and frequent. We'd discover them
through mathematical analysis of the spectrum and the signal.

To
send this kind of signal would not be beyond our means currently - should we
wish to reveal ourselves to the universe, we could do so with the Helios laser
at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Borra
instructed graduate student Eric Trottier to comb through 2.5 million stars in
search of such a signal, who found it in 234 of them, most of which are in the
same spectral class as the Sun.

Borra
said of the results:

We
have to follow a scientific approach, not an emotional one, but intuitively –
my emotion speaks now – I strongly suspect that it’s an ETI signal.

Other
astronomers are less convinced. Andrew
Siemion, the director of the SETI Research Centre at the University of
California Berkeley, said:

There
is perhaps no bolder claim that one could make in observational astrophysics
than the discovery of intelligent life beyond the Earth.

It’s
an incredibly profound subject—and of course that’s why many of us devote our
lives to the field and put so much energy into trying to answer these
questions. But you can’t make such definitive statements about detections
unless you’ve exhausted every possible means of follow-up.

A
Breakthrough Listen Initiative, set up to monitor the stars Borra found
emitting these stars, later ranked the detection as a zero to one on the Rio
Scale for SETI observations, meaning that it is insignificant. An
omni-directional beacon would be ranked a two on the index, whereas an
Earth-specific message would be a six.

The
scale does give you pause for thought - it's likely our first contact with
extraterrestrial life will be a lot more ambiguous than a giant spaceship
landing in Manhattan.

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Usman Abrar

Astronomy

Intelligent Alien Life

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1 comments:

What of we are the alieans? Humans have been trying to separate themselves from the earth for years now. Covering the earth with cement, houses, destroying it slowly and slowly pushing ourselves apart to develop a new era...plus, we are so different from all the other animals...it's just an idea